Cold Fire

But her parents were salt-of the-earth working-class people who had denied themselves many pleasures in order to give her a first-rate education, and they wanted nothing but the best for her. They would be devastated to hear that she loathed her name, when they no doubt thought it was clever and even sophisticated. She loved them fiercely, and she had to be in the deepest trenches of depression before she had the gall to blame them for her shortcomings.

Half afraid that she would pick up the phone and call them, she quickly turned to her computer again and accessed the current-edition file. The Press's data-retrieval system made it possible for any reporter on staff to follow any story through editing, typesetting, and production.

Now the tomorrow's edition had been formatted, locked down, and sent to the printer she could actually call up an image of each page on her screen.

Only the headlines were big enough to read, but any portion of the image could be enlarged to fill the screen. Sometimes she could cheer herself a little by reading a big story before the newspaper hit the street; it sparked in her at cast a dim glimmer of the feeling of being an insider, which was one aspect of the job that attracted every dream-besotted young person to a vocation in journalism.

But as she scanned the headlines on the first few pages, looking for an interesting story to enlarge, her gloom deepened. A big fire in St.

Louis, nine people dead. Presentiments of war in the Mid-East. An oil spill off Japan. A huge storm and flood in India, tens of thousands homeless. The federal government was raising taxes again. She had always known that the news industry flourished on gloom, disaster, scandal, mindless violence, and strife. But suddenly it seemed to be a singularly ghoulish business, and Holly realized that she no longer wanted to be an insider, among the first to know this dreadful stuff Then, just as she was about to close the file and switch off the computer, a headline arrested her MYSTERIOUS STRANGER SAVES BOY. The events at McAlbery School were not quite twelve days in the past, and those four words had a special association for her. Curiosity triggered, she instructed the computer to enlarge the quadrant in which the story began.

The dateline was Boston, and the story was accompanied by a photograph.

The picture was still blurry and dark, but the scale was now large enough to allow her to read the text, although not comfortably. She instructed the computer to further enlarge one of the already enlarged quadrants, pulling up the first column of the article so she could read it without strain.

The opening line made Holly sit up straighter in her chair: A courageous bystander, who would say only that his name was Jim, saved the life of Nicholas O'Conner, 6, when a New England Power and Light Company vault exploded under a sidewalk in a Boston residential area Thursday evening.

Softly, she said, "What the hell.?" She tapped the keys, instructing the computer to shift the field of display rightward on the page to show her the multiply enhanced photo that accompanied the piece. She went to a bigger scale, then to a still bigger one, until the face filled the screen.

Jim Ironheart.

Briefly she sat in stunned disbelief, immobile. Then she was stricken by a need to know more,not only an intellectual but a genuinely physical need that felt not unlike a sudden and intense pang of hunger.

She returned to the text of the story and read it through, then read it again. The O'Conner boy had been sitting on the sidewalk in front of his home, directly on the two-by-three-foot concrete lid that covered the entrance to the power company's vault, which was spacious enough for four men to work together within its subterranean confines. The kid had been playing with toy trucks. His parents had been within sight of him on the front porch of their house, when a stranger had sprinted along the street "He comes right at Nicky," the boy's father was quoted, "snatches him, I thought sure he was a nutcase child molester going to steal my son." Carrying the screaming child, the stranger leaped over a low picket fence onto the O'Conners' lawn, just as a 17,000-volt line in the vault exploded behind him. The blast flipped the concrete lid high into the air, as if it was a penny, and a bright ball of fire roared up in In its wake.

Embarrassed by the effusive praise heaped on him by Nicky's grateful parents and by the neighbors who had witnessed his heroism, the stranger claimed that he had smelled burning insulation, heard a hissing coming from the vault, and knew what was about to happen because he had "once worked for a power company." Annoyed that a witness had taken his photograph, he insisted on leaving before the media arrived because, as he put it, "I place a high value on my privacy.”